Desire's Role in Identity
My findings this month (or last few) and my attempts at undoing them.
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“Love is a pleasure that remains a wish. As the longing for love is satisfied, the wish for love increases.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have always believed appreciation has a ceiling. Without limitations to what can be consumed and reveled by the human experience, there would exist no chance for appreciation. The mere fact that we cannot soak in every ounce of a moment or a person or an epiphany is what causes our fascination and desire for more. My heart's desires only exist because I want to consume them, to crawl into them until every last piece of myself is unrecognizable and only desire remains.
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“Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy. For in the soul filled by the object, no corner is left for saying I. May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.” - Simone Weil’s, Gravity and Grace
I think I’m saying this capacity for feelings is necessary. If it wasn’t there I’d have exploded long ago. This ceiling on what’s allowed to transpire is all that stands between losing my individuality to the objects I desire. I’d cease to exist. Without I, there is no room for desire. We live in tandem.
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“To crave and to have are as like a thing and its shadow, for when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it… and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.” - Marilyn Robinson, Housekeeping
But who’s to say these objects aren’t just another form of my identity? Me, in another shape. Me, consumed. Who’s to say that me taken with- love, if you will, is not still me? If love takes me over and fills my head with worms, is that not still me? A loopy delusional, still me? Who’s to say it’s not the most authentic way to live, overflowing and devoted? Changed by movable attractions. I’m only just another object, I too, bend at will.
To devote yourself to something might as well be to live as truthfully as humanly possible. To let evolution bring you closer to a mass will, I suppose.
But I’ve been contemplating where desire ends and my identity begins. And just how intertwined they can become without losing sight of my authenticity. Does desire define identity or is identity simply punctuated by desire, among other things?
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This meme variant version of a poem or thought I found on the internet somewhere: To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
The act of desiring is the act of emulsifying into existence. It’s real because someone somewhere wanted it to be.
I’ve been thinking about my friends a lot lately and how much I truly love them. I love them more than I’ve ever loved anything I think; past lovers, old pets, family even. I think friendship might be the greatest love we ever get to experience. Finding someone who sees you for who you are on any given day, and not expecting you to stay the same, and still loving each version of yourself. Still giving time and space to any version you can and will be. I think that’s a deeper, more profound love than I could ever think up. To simply let someone be open to interpretation, open to changing, open to becoming anything and everything.
I exist because my friends allow me to. I’m immortal because they want to remember me.
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Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
My interpretation of the text:
Rilke writes about objects that hold a certain power, with substance independent of the observer's perspective. In Archaic Torso of Apollo, the statue is a seemingly perfect form, despite its surface level flaws, such as cracking and headlessness. The statue, steadfast within itself, forces the observer to reflect, and is so much its own object that it pulls the observer- and in turn, the reader, into a new reality, a sobering revelation into the flaws of their own life. The statue itself is a metaphor for the power the observer is lacking, or is made aware that he’s lacking.
“The observer does not define the object. The object defines the observer.”
This desire to change his life must have existed before this statue, just as I wanted to change my life before I read this poem. It was only when he came face to face with the statue that desire bubbled to the surface.
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But then there’s the desire that attributes itself to obsession. And what thin line separates the two. Obsession. Fascination. Infatuation. I’ve dabbled in the ideal or two- in the romanticization of mundanity around me, twirling it into a dreamlike state of desire. It’s what I do. I’ve always made things out to be better or worse than they ever are in reality, even when I try my best not to.
I recently watched Saltburn, a movie about obsession and what we’ll do to achieve our desires, among other things. My favorite media is often based upon desire; sometimes devotion, and the paradox that seeps its way into obsession. There’s something incredibly telling about what we yearn for so deeply, but are quick to cast away the minute we sober up or come to our senses.
It circles back to the ceiling on attainability. There must be a ceiling, otherwise it would all cease to exist. It’s not the desire to be with someone that creates a physical manifestation of want, but the act of what you’ll do to get as close as possible to it. It’s the swapping of clothing, like in Call Me By Your Name, when Elio wears Oliver’s swim trunks, or in Norwegian Wood, when Toru sleeps with Reiko to feel closer to Naoko after her death. In Saltburn, it’s taken a step further, when main character Oliver uses his sexual advantage and cunning quirks to climb his way into his desires, yet it’s still almost never enough. It’s this way we find any chance to say that we’re connected to this desire, that we’ll take breadcrumbs, in order to transform into it.
Even when desire manifests falsely, or obscenely, or exaggerated beyond repair, it still seems to speak to an authenticity within us. Maybe obsession is just identity under a distorted magnifying glass.
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Dakota Warren’s blog post, There Is No End Because We Don’t Want It To End
Dakota talks about her newfound hobby of being present, and living moment to moment, as opposed to sulking in it for ages. This is a hobby I, too, have picked up recently, as I also used to find myself getting trapped in the passing of moments, to the point that I could never enjoy myself because all I could think about was the fact that this one was constantly ending and the next one was constantly ushering in. She states her trouble with balancing between moments because she’s too focused on the present now. She can’t exist in a state of cohesion because “the all-consuming optimism is always short lived by virtue of the passage of time.” And this is my own personal struggle with desire. My inclinations seem to sway farther and wider as the days pass by. I can never quite answer my own questions, or quench my own thirst because I can never pinpoint what I hunger for. I say I want one thing, but really I’m saying I need another. I’ll ache for something until I have it and then realize it’s not at all what I wanted. Only the ceiling of my want made me think so. It’s this paradox that keeps the pool of desire alive.
Don’t get me wrong, I have my moments of content. On a daily basis I can be okay with where I am, who I am, what I’m doing, but it’s only to stave off the insanity of dissatisfaction. There is always an underlying desire of yearning, and a need to shift or grow in some way, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. It’s human evolution to reposition.
So what is desire’s role in identity? How closely tied are the two?
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Despite these light grasps I have on a moment, and the struggle of oscillating between one mood and another, one desire and another, these are the strings that tether me to existence, thus to my identity. These desires, no matter how fleeting or seemingly insignificant, or distorted, are what stake me to the ground I walk on. What is identity if not just desire culminated, permeated by outside forces?
These objects of my desire; these poems, my friends, memes, my need for more, to find a community, move cities, change my outfit, or fall in love, are all the strings connecting me to reality, tying me to an existence beyond I, situating me in time. It’s our impact on the world around us that solidifies us into existence outside of our own body.
Here’s to me, letting myself be consumed by desire.